Nadya Skylung and the Masked Kidnapper Page 3

  Trouble is, I promised Mrs. T I wouldn’t use it anymore.

  There’s something dangerous on it, see, called the Malumbra. It’s a shadow creature that infests the mind of anybody who touches it. Aaron and I had a run-in with it last month. It got control of me for a few minutes and tried to make me let the air out of the Orion’s cloud balloon, but I shook it off, and then Aaron burned it out of me completely. I still don’t know how he did it.

  Whatever the Malumbra is, it’s real dangerous. It took over the whole Roof of the World, and Nic thinks it wants the rest of the Cloud Sea too.

  Aaron, I say cautiously. You’re supposed to ask me out loud if you need something. The Panpathia’s dangerous right now.

  It’s always dangerous, Aaron huffs, but he gets off it anyway.

  “I’m up h-h-here,” he says, pointing at a bay with a low, leafy green plant turning pink around the edges. He’s younger than the rest of us kids on board by about five years and skinny as a beanstalk. His hair’s getting shaggy too, forming a curly red-brown dome around his head. With his pale skin, he could be Pepper’s cousin. He’s been through a lot. First he lost his family, then he got imprisoned by pirates on the cloudship Remora, and since we rescued him and took him aboard he’s been trying to adjust to life in a new place. He’s kinda latched on to me, and I try my best to be nice to him.

  I sigh. “That plant’s Ironbelly. He starts off green, then turns pink, and then in about a week he’ll grow a big red bud. When the bud blooms, there’ll be a chunk of iron the size of your fist inside, ready to harvest. Then he’ll go dormant and the cycle will repeat.” Ironbelly’s one of the plants that grows trade goods for us. They’re a big part of how we make enough money to keep flying.

  “Oh,” Aaron mumbles. “Sorry.” He looks down, and I feel bad for sighing at him. He’s got a lot to learn, and he’s doing a good job of it.

  I scramble over the catwalks to him, hopping up a ladder, then moving the lobster claws that keep me clipped to the ship. I sway with the balloon as the night breeze pushes it. Below me, little fire spirits dance cozily in lanterns along the Orion’s deck, and Thom starts chatting with Tian Li about something.

  “No worries,” I tell Aaron when I get to him. I smile and pat his shoulder. “You’re doing great.” I ruffle his hair. “Why don’t you go see if you can scrounge us up a treat in the galley? We’re running low on supplies, but I’m pretty sure Nic has an emergency chocolate stash behind the sink. I’ll finish up here and then come find you.”

  Aaron grins. “Okay, Nadya,” he says, and he starts the long climb down to the Orion.

  I lean back and look at the stars as they come out, some in big streams crossing each other up high, others clustering near the horizon. The catwalks click and clack around me. I feel like everything’s part of a huge machine, changing gears and moving the world along. I hang there enjoying it until a ladder clanks below me and I see Thom climbing my way. I wave to him.

  “How’re you doing?” he says when he reaches me. He leans back against his harness too, stretches his arms behind his head and relaxes. He doesn’t usually work up here, but he knows the whole ship stem to stern, and he’s comfortable everywhere.

  I shrug. “Pretty good.” I don’t want to tell him about my fight with Pep. “My leg’s a little sore.”

  “Well, you did give it quite a workout this afternoon.” He raises his eyebrows. “The second my back was turned.”

  I roll my eyes. “I didn’t stop and see what you were doing, Thom. I just wanted to win the game!”

  Thom chuckles. “I guess I can’t blame you for that. I used to play a pretty mean game of broomball myself, back when I was a kid.” He smiles at the stars on the horizon. “Man, it’s pretty up here. Y’know I used to take care of the outerplants on one of the ships I worked on between leaving Nic and coming back as his first mate? I always loved it.” He peeks over my shoulder at Ironbelly. “Looks like you’re doing a great job.”

  I flush a little. “Thanks.” I’ve been worried about whether I’m doing well now that Mrs. T isn’t around to supervise me. It’s really nice to hear that Thom approves.

  When I look back at him, Thom’s rubbing the stubble on his jaw. He opens his mouth, closes it, then takes a deep breath. “Look,” he says, “I wanted to talk to you about the Malumbra. I’ve been doing some reading, and I’ve learned a few things you should know. There are stories in some of the fireminder histories about a war between it and the fire spirits, hundreds of years ago, that raged across worlds.”

  Slowly, my mind shifts gears away from thinking about the plants. “Worlds?” I ask. “Like, more than one?”

  “Yes,” Thom says. “All the worlds in the universe—ours, the World Beyond, and probably others we don’t know about—exist in parallel, sort of like sheets of paper with empty space between. This fight happened over several of them.”

  Down on the deck, Tian Li turns the ship, and I watch as the stars wheel around Thom’s head. He and I brace ourselves against the plant bays as the balloon swings. I can’t imagine anything so big it could fight a war over one world, let alone a bunch of them. “What is this thing?”

  Thom looks up at the stars. “Imagine a leviathan, swimming in the space between the worlds, insatiably hungry for life and intelligence. When it sniffs out a world like ours, it sticks its head in and starts eating. That’s the Malumbra.”

  I shiver. Back down on the ship, our little deck lamps seem awfully small and fragile.

  “It consumes whole planes of existence, Nadya. The fire spirits only fought it off because there were a lot of them, and they were united, and fire’s the thing it hates most.” He frowns and touches the faded fabric of the cloud balloon. “I know that’s a lot to swallow, but I wanted you to be aware of it. This thing got its teeth in you once, and from what I read, it doesn’t let go easily. It must be tempting to explore the Panpathia, and I’m not gonna waste my time telling you not to do it at all. But be careful. If you see anything funny on there, you run first and ask questions later, okay?”

  I nod, my mouth dry. I remember feeling shadow and ice on my neck, and my body moving without me telling it what to do. I don’t want another run-in with the Malumbra any more than Thom does.

  Thom unclips his lobster claws and gets ready to head back down. “I know you think you can do anything,” he says, “and you’ve amazed me with what you’re capable of. But the Malumbra is bigger and more powerful than you can imagine. For now, you leave it to me and Nic.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The next day I’m sitting on the edge of the pond in the cloud garden, swirling my foot in the water and trying to ignore the ghost pain shooting up my injured leg. Pep barely said two words to me at breakfast, and Thom’s warning is sticking with me like aphids on a plant stem.

  But at the same time, the Panpathia calls to me. I woke up three times last night with it glowing in my mind, almost ready to jump onto it and go look for Mrs. T or that girl I saw on the Panpathia. She reached out hundreds of miles looking for help, and she found me. I could be her only hope of getting rescued.

  Sighing, I get up to check the controls that let air in and out of the balloon to make us rise or sink. I pass a couple of tall, shady palm trees with their leaves yellowing and frown. Even though the plants outside are in good shape and I’m trying my hardest, I’m having trouble keeping everything inside the cloud balloon healthy. And I can’t figure out what’s bothering them without going on the Panpathia to ask.

  “You guys okay?” I ask, patting the trunk of one of the yellowing palms. “Tell me what you need.”

  They’re silent. Trees don’t have ears, you know? You have to be able to talk to the spirit inside them. I grind my teeth and decide to come back and check on the palms again later. We’re coming into Far Agondy, and it’s my job to fine-tune the elevation as we pull up to the docks.


  I continue to the controls and see that the levels are holding steady as a rock, so there’s nothing for me to do but wait for word from Nic as we get closer.

  Something thumps gently below me, like maybe the Orion bumped into another ship, but everything seems fine. That happens sometimes when we get into heavy ship traffic, and we have bumpers to cushion it.

  I close my eyes and try to lose myself for a bit. It’s warm and damp in the garden, and the sun-in-a-jar that hangs in the center is going from its day cycle to its night cycle. It feels like sunset in the sugar islands. The birds are chirping. The bees are buzzing. The plants smell damp and rustle quietly. The frogs jump in and out of the water, chattering in their language. Aaron moves around on the other side of the garden, humming to the plants.

  “Nadya!” Tam shouts through a tinny speaker near my ear. His voice sounds like a trumpet, so loud I flinch. He must be up on the catwalks, which is weird because his docking station is down on the deck, where he can make sure nothing happens to the rigging.

  I rub my ears. “Yes, Tam?”

  “We need you on deck!” he says. “It’s an emergency! Nic wants everybody right away!”

  My stomach plunges faster than a cloudship with a punctured balloon. “What? Why?”

  “It’s the pirates,” Tam says. “They’re gone!”

  CHAPTER 4

  IN WHICH NADYA GETS IN DEEP, DEEP TROUBLE.

  I crutch out of the balloon as fast as I can. It’s pretty hard cranking the locking wheels in the waiting house open and shut with a bum shoulder while standing on one leg, so Aaron does it for me this time around. Then, after the whirr and pop of the garden air being pumped out and the outside air rushing in, I head for the ladder, working my safety lines with one hand.

  Tam’s waiting there, next to a winch and a swing we’ve set up to raise and lower me from the catwalks to the deck when I need to move fast. He’s frowning and fidgeting, bouncing around like a squirrel with a hawk perched above it.

  “What happened?” I ask while Aaron heads down the ladder. The rest of the crew’s already on deck. I can see the Orion’s whole topside from bow to stern, and it doesn’t look like anything’s wrong.

  Tam takes my crutches and holds the swing steady while I sit and clip it to my harness. “I dunno,” he says, handing my crutches back and heading to the winch. “We were approaching the docks. There was a lot of ship traffic around us. I had my eyes on a big liner just above and to the left of us, but there were a couple other ships around too. Then there was this big boom, and I thought we must’ve crashed into one of them, but I didn’t see anything except smoke under the portside bow. I was still trying to figure out what was happening when Pepper ran out from inside the ship shouting that the pirates were gone, and Nic called everyone on deck.”

  Tam starts lowering me. The winch creaks a little, but it’s a smooth ride through cool, salty air as I descend. I look for the smoke he’s talking about, but it’s not there. Whatever caused the problem, it seems like it’s over.

  Except that the pirates are gone.

  My stomach twists. The pirates were going to be our key piece of evidence that Mrs. T got kidnapped. Our plan was to turn them over to the Cloud Navy, a fleet of armed cloudships maintained by the Six Cities around the edge of the Cloud Sea, and hope that the navy could get them to fess up about where their friends might’ve gone. Then the navy could track the Remora down, stop it from pirating any other ships, and, most important, rescue Mrs. T.

  Without them, we can’t do any of that.

  As I swing in the breeze, I turn and watch our approach into Far Agondy. Tall Thom’s at the wheel, and the ship’s moving ahead real slow. We’re about two hundred feet above the waves, which are deep blue and dotted with sailing boats and steam-powered coast crawlers that trade up and down the continent in the shallow water where they’re safe from leviathans. Behind them, the city stretches toward cloudy mountains inland like a forest of silver knives.

  Far Agondy’s tall, see, like other cities aren’t. It’s built around a dagger-shaped island in the middle of a river, with the point of the dagger stabbing toward the ocean and the harbor. Nic says it got its start as a place for coast crawlers to meet and trade with river runners heading inland to the deep forests and silver mines. It grew bigger and bigger, and now the harbor at the tip of the dagger has slips for eighty water-going ships, and the cloudship spires sticking out of the shallow waters of the bay like needles have room for a hundred flying ones.

  We’re cruising toward our usual spot: Slip 6, Spire B. There’s four spires total for cloudships. Each one’s an ironwork column about fifty feet in diameter and thirty stories high, with jetties for ships to dock at sticking out in four directions every five stories. We use a slip that’s owned by a supplier Nic knows. Because we buy so much, they give us a pretty good deal on the fee for tying up.

  Slip 6 is on the city side of the spire, so Thom has to bring us around. The cloudship closest to us, on the ocean side of the spire, looks like a deep-sea trawler. Its deck’s covered in nets and cages and has two big winches off either end. Its cloud balloon’s got a design of a school of fish leaping out of the waves in a storm.

  I lose sight of the spire as Tam finishes lowering me and I unclip from the swing. Nic’s standing by one of the capstans, staring worriedly at the Orion’s bow. The wind puffs strong scents off the city: motor oil, the hot and sweet stench of garbage, a sort of fishy funk, and—more than anything else—smoke. Far Agondy’s the smokiest place in the Cloud Sea. There’s a giant fire spirit living in a cavern underneath it. It burns trash, coal, oil, and a whole bunch of other stuff that the city government feeds to it in big power stations. All that heat makes steam, which turns turbines, which generate electricity, so on top of being the world’s smokiest city, Far Agondy’s also its most electrified. The trams run on electricity. The elevators in the skyscrapers run on electricity. The lights run on electricity. At night, it’s like a firefly wonderland.

  I crutch into line between Pepper and Salyeh, who’s staring forward like Nic. Tian Li frowns next to him.

  “What happened?” I whisper to Pep while Aaron, who’s still pretty slow on the ladder, gets down behind us and falls into line. Tam clanks rapidly down the rungs above him.

  Pep fidgets and wipes some soot off her nose onto her overalls. “I was keeping an eye on the engine room, making sure the fire spirits didn’t get too rowdy or slack off, and I heard this real light thump from forward, near the pirate brig. I stuck my head out to investigate, and when I did, there was a huge boom, and a cloud of smoke poufed back at me. I grabbed a water bucket and ran forward in case it was a fire, but when I got to the brig there was nothing there—just a hole in the hull where the wall used to be—and no more pirates.”

  She looks up worriedly toward Nic, who’s still staring silently forward. We’ve gotten into the flow of traffic around the spires, following a garbage scow. Thom should have us into Slip 6 anytime now, which means whatever Nic’s going to say, it’ll have to be quick. It takes all of us to tie up the ship.

  Tam thumps to the deck and runs up, puffing hard. Nic starts talking, right on cue. “I’ll keep this short,” he says. “About fifteen minutes ago, there was an explosion in the room we’ve been using as a brig. By the time I got down to investigate, Pepper and Salyeh were already there, and the pirates were gone.”

  My guts churn. Hearing Nic say it makes it seem more real, somehow, and the realer it gets, the less likely it seems we’ll ever get Mrs. T back. “What do you mean, ‘gone’?” I ask. “Gone where?”

  Nic sighs. “That, it seems, is the operative question. We’re still two hundred feet off the waves, high enough that if they jumped, they almost certainly perished. We don’t—”

  I crutch toward the deck railing over the brig. “They’re still here, then!” I blurt out. “They must be on the lines somewhere! We have to catch
—”

  “Nadya Skylung, freeze!” Nic shouts.

  I stop moving, and a feeling like midwinter snow tumbles down my back and collects in my spine.

  “Turn around,” Nic says more softly, but there’s still a nail-sharp edge in his voice. When I do as he says, his nostrils are flared and he’s taking short, fast breaths. His arms are trembling.

  “On this ship,” he says, and he says it like he’s talking to all of us, but I know he’s talking to me especially, “we often let discipline slide. We want you to think and act for yourselves, to ask questions, to be independent. I think the benefits of that approach have spoken for themselves over the last month.”

  When we were on our own after the pirates kidnapped him, Thom, and Mrs. T, he means.

  He takes a deep breath. “But we are nevertheless a crew. I am the captain. You are the hands. When I speak, you listen. When I give orders, you obey.”

  I cringe, feeling about as small as a cloud bug that’s just encountered a sparrow. I didn’t mean to disobey any orders. But I thought there was still a chance to catch the pirates.

  “All the ports we visit are dangerous, Far Agondy more so than most. And this trip, Far Agondy may be especially dangerous, so I want to be crystal clear: This is an order. From this moment on, you will do nothing without consulting myself or Mr. Abernathy first. You will refer to us properly, by our ranks. You will maintain proper discipline, and you will toe the line, or we will reconsider our crewing arrangements. Have I made myself clear?”